Literature by period

Eudora Welty, A curtain of green (Review)

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This week I received the Library of America’s annual email in which they list their “Top 10 Story of the Week selections of 2016″. I’ve only read eleven of their selections this year, but two – Kate Chopin’s “A pair of silk stockings” (my review) and Willa Cather’s “Enchanted bluff” (my review) – are in their Top Ten. More interesting to me though is that it contains another writer I like, Eudora Welty. I read her book One writer’s beginnings and what is probably her most famous short story, “Why I live at the P.O.”, before I started blogging, so I decided to read this Top Ten story, “A curtain of green”.

weltycurtainofgreenWelty was a short story writer and novelist who wrote mostly about the South. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 with her novel The optimist’s daughter and, according to Wikipedia, was the first living writer to be published by the Library of America (LOA)! “A curtain of green” was one of her early stories. It provided the title for (and was included in of course) her first published collection of short stories (1941), which also includes “Why I live at the P.O.”

However, before I get to the story, I want to share a little from One writer’s beginnings. This book originated in a series of lectures, the inaugural ones apparently, she gave in 1983 at Harvard University, the William E Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilisation. The cover of my 1984 edition claims that it was on the New York Times Bestseller List for 46 weeks! Pretty impressive for a series of essays I think. She was born in 1909 in Jackson Mississippi, the eldest of three. From the opening pages of the book she tells us how her growing up contributed to her writing.

For example, in the first paragraph she mentions growing up “to the striking of clocks”. She’s not sure whether it’s because of her father’s Ohio family “having been Swiss back in the 1700s” but her family were all “time-minded” all of their lives:

This was good at least for a fiction writer, being able to learn so penetratingly and first of all, about chronology. It was one of a good many things I learned, almost without knowing it; it would be there when I needed it.

Surely there’s a little bit of the tongue-in-cheek in her reference to the Swiss origins? Anyhow, two pages in, and she’s talking about her parents’ respective reactions to the weather, her father’s caution regarding storms for example and her mother’s rejection of that “as a character failing”:

So I developed a strong meteorological sensibility. In years ahead, when I wrote stories, atmosphere took its influential role from the start. Commotion in the weather and inner feelings aroused by such a hovering disturbance emerged in dramatic form.

And so the book continues in this delightful manner, sharing her childhood with affection, perception and a wonderful sly wit … but now to “A curtain of green” in which meteorological conditions do, in fact, feature!

“A curtain of green” is about grief, but it starts

Every day one summer in Larkin’s Hill, it rained a little. The rain was a regular thing, and would come about two o’clock in the afternoon.

One day, almost as late as five o’clock, the sun was still shining …

It tells the story of Mrs Larkin whose husband had died the previous summer in a terrible accident – a tree, “a fragrant chinaberry”, had come crashing down on his car as he was arriving home. She had seen it happening, had believed her love would keep him safe. And so now, while the other women of the town sit inside “fanning and sighing, waiting for the rain”, Mrs Larkin is out in her garden, where she is now all the time, because “since the accident in which her husband had been killed, she had never once been seen anywhere else”. It’s a fertile garden, needs “cutting, separating, thinning and tying back” to keep the plants from “overreaching their boundaries and multiplying out of all reason”. But, Mrs Larkin is deranged with grief. She does none of this, just works incessantly, obsessively, planting

thickly and hastily, without stopping to think, without any regard for the ideas that her neighbours might elect in their club as to what constituted an appropriate vista, or an effect of restfulness, or even harmony of colour. Just to what end Mrs Larkin worked so strenuously in her garden, her neighbours could not see …

She doesn’t offer flowers when they’re sick or die, for example. I love how the language in this story just piles on, driving us forward this way and that, just like Mrs Larkin’s grief does to her. The garden, to the neighbours who had initially tried to support her, “had the appearance of a sort of jungle, in which the slight, heedless form of the owner daily lost itself”. It’s oppressive to us, but Mrs Larkin has isolated herself behind her “curtain of green”. The only person she tolerates in this garden, and then only occasionally, is Jamey, “the coloured boy who worked in the neighbourhood”.

At this point in the story, which is told third person, the perspective shifts from omniscient to subjective, to Mrs Larkin’s point-of-view, that is. We are now in the garden with her as her memory returns her to the day of the accident. Suddenly all is still, “everything had stopped again, stillness had mesmerised the plants …” Jamey infuriates her, with his “look of docility”, of being “lost in some impossible dream of his own”. She watches him – her hunger for his innocence suddenly overtaken by a fury at his youthfulness, at his being able to be lost in this, to her, “impossible dream”. She’s overwhelmed by the unaccountability of accident, of life and death, by the meaningless of it all, and wants to smash his innocent absorption – but then comes the rain. There are two more pages in the story after this, but I’ll finish here.

This story was written in 1938 – quickly written and easily published, according to LOA. LOA also tells us that in 1931, Welty and her mother had been present when her father died of leukaemia, and they quote Welty’s biographer Suzanne Marrs as saying that her mother “discovered solace in gardening”. She spent hours in her garden, most days, often with Eudora by her side. Welty, says Marrs, wrote in an unpublished essay that “its [the garden’s] peace and fragrance are soothing to frayed nerves when we are weary from contact or perhaps conflict with the everyday world.” This memory clearly informed her story of the grieving Mrs Larkin.

“A curtain of green” is a great read, for its exploration of how grief can derail you, making you, temporarily at least, a little mad; for its evocative writing which captures that sense of derailment, taking you right into that garden with Mrs Larkin; and for its resolution which offers hope without being simplistic about it. After such a year as this has been, it seems just the right story to end on. Happy New Year everyone!

Eudora Welty
“A curtain of green”
First published in: Southern Review (Autumn 1938).
Available: Online at the Library of America

Georgia Blain: Births deaths marriages: True tales (Review)

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Georgia Blain, Births deaths marriagesPoignant is a word I actively avoid in my review posts, as it’s such a review cliché, but sometimes a book really does call for it, and the late Georgia Blain’s essay-collection-cum-memoir, Births deaths marriages, is such a book. In the last essay, she talks of her mother, broadcaster, activist and non-fiction writer, Anne Deveson, trying her hand at fiction just as she, Blain, was trying non-fiction. She writes:

We had switched places, my mother and I. And we looked at each other. Both mothers. Both writers. Both trying on each other’s shoes, taking a few steps back, eyes on our feet, before we glanced across once again, curious as to how this had happened (“A room of one’s own (2)”)

The poignant thing, of course, is that these two who were so closely entwined in life, not just as mother-and-daughter but as writers, died within a few days of each other – with the sadly ironic twist that the daughter died first. It makes my heart break a little, something I wouldn’t have felt had I read it before these deaths. Such is the impact of context on our reading, eh?

Anyhow, onto the book. Births deaths marriages (the title has no separating commas) is the second memoir-in-essay-form that I’ve read this year, the first being Fiona Wright’s Small acts of disappearance. Both books follow a general chronological arc but the essay form makes it easy for this not to be strict, allowing the writers to follow tangential yet relevant threads. From here, though, the two “memoirs” depart, because the respective writers’ lives are very different. Wright, the younger writer, was writing primarily about her twenties and focused particularly on her experience of an eating disorder, while Blain was in her mid forties when writing hers. She was a published novelist and, significantly, had experienced a much more public life, not only because both her parents were public figures but also because of her mother’s own memoir, Tell me I’m here, about life with her schizophrenic son.

This book – with its intensely personal subject matter and its unusual form – offers rich opportunity for discussion. To do it justice, I’m going to have to narrow it, so I’m going to focus on form and style, but some content will push through along the way. The way I see it, there are two broad types of memoir, those which tell about lives most of us know little or nothing about (such as Frank McCourt’s Angela’s ashes, or, more obviously, celebrity memoirs) and those which are about lives much like ours. Georgia Blain’s falls into this latter category. For these ones to engage readers, they need to offer something illuminating about the lives we lead.

“the truth was a little more complex” (from “Getting in the boat”)

The first essay in Blain’s memoir is titled “A room of one’s own”. In it she reflects on her childhood, on how her mother would write about their family for newspaper columns and how reading these columns later, with their bland pictures that “did not accurately reflect who we were”, brought back the child she was, the child who wanted her family to be like the one in the columns, who thought all other families were like that and not like the messy reality she was experiencing. These bland columns are the antithesis of what Blain shares in her essays (and indeed of what Deveson herself shared in her memoir). It’s all about purpose I suppose. Newspaper columns tend to be more about entertainment – with perhaps some subtle messages about life – whilst memoirs, good ones anyhow, are about “truth”. If we don’t feel the memoirist is sharing the “truth” of her (or his) experience we are going to lose interest pretty quickly.

Blain convinces me that she is sharing her truths when, for example, she describes, in “The story my mother tells me” and “The outside country”, her fears about childbirth and her struggle to cope with the demands of motherhood. She exposes herself with soul-baring honesty when she shares her sense of disconnect, of being alone, of being “shattered” when her baby is born. She writes that she wanted to give her daughter “the place in my life that she needed and deserved, one that was without my terror and anxiety about loss of self” but it took several months for this to happen. She writes with similar honesty about her relationship with her husband Andrew. It takes some guts to write what she does.

In “Close to the bone”, Blain addresses more directly her writing life, and the difference between writing fiction, which she’d done until this book, and writing about herself, which she was now doing. Reflecting on her brother’s death, she says:

The complexity and rawness of an immediate response to pain is not easy to understand and recognise, let alone pin down in writing, in a photograph or in a film. The very act of capturing distorts. Once neatly contained, all that we felt is no longer unruly, unreasoned, immediate and wild. Perhaps this is why we hold these moments as truth. They cannot be replicated. Each time we try, we dilute their intensity, we confuse, holding up false images of this so-called truth that leave us reeling as we try to reconcile what we see encapsulated with what we have experienced.

Even her “truth”, the one she is writing, she sees, is not easy to grasp. She goes on:

I believed, and still do, that if I wrote about my own life and the lives of those I love, I had to tell the truth. But foolishly, I believed the truth lay only in the immediate…

These two excerpts reminded me of that David Hockney comment about happiness being a retrospective thing I wrote about recently, because I read them as her recognition that there are different truths – those immediate reactions and feelings, and those that come later. It’s this sort of reflection on “how” we live and interpret our lives which makes Births deaths marriages such a meaningful read.

I said that this memoir exemplifies the second type of my two simple categories, but I meant it when I defined them as being about “lives much like ours” because no life is the same. And so, Blain, like all of us, had her own set of challenges, including her control-freak, sometimes-violent father, and the tragic loss of her schizophrenic brother. One of the joys of her book lies in watching her explore and expose her own development, her learning not only to come to terms with these experiences in her life, but to use them to come to a more open, flexible way of understanding. She writes of “chasing absolutes”, of believing that “there was one truthful answer to every question” which she had to pin down, when in fact, as she learns, the truth lies in the “layers”.

In the end, there are no resolutions, she realises, but there are momentary happy endings along the way. She also realises that “writing about oneself” can “amount to more than a purely personal exercise”. It sure can, as she has proven here. This memoir is special – and not just because of the context in which I am reading it – but because it’s honest, because it doesn’t pretend to have it all sorted, because, in fact, it’s true – to her life and experience, and also to ours.

AWW Logo 2016Georgia Blain
Births deaths marriages: True tales
North Sydney: Vintage Books, 2008
ISBN: 9781742743981 (eBook)

Elizabeth Jolley, An innocent gentleman (Mini-Review)

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Elizabeth Jolley, An innocent gentlemanNote: this is a mini-review compiled from the notes I made when I read Elizabeth Jolley’s An innocent gentleman before blogging. I found them on some scrappy pieces of paper while decluttering and figured my blog is the best place to keep them … not floating in some drawer somewhere!

Most if not all of Elizabeth Jolley’s books that I’ve read deal with the difficulties in forming and maintaining meaningful human relationships. Of course, a lot of writers do this – after all people and their relationships are the stuff of life. But Elizabeth Jolley tends to deal with the disturbing or unsettling sides of our relationships. She explores the ‘feelings’ people have but often don’t admit to, such as feelings for a person of the same sex or for a person for whom they should not have feelings. This might be because of age or power differences or infidelity. She shows how difficult it is – though we desire it so – to maintain a long-term intimate or deep relationship that is equal on all levels (physical, intellectual, social, material, etc). And she usually does it with a deep sense of irony. In this, she is, to me, a contemporary Jane Austen.

And so, in An innocent gentleman, Jolley’s last novel, we have three main characters – Henry, Muriel and Mr Hawthorne – who have a complicated set of relationships with each other based on wishes and desires for something deeper, happier. The setting is World War 2, and the woman, Muriel, has married ‘down’ according to her mother. Henry is her husband, and Mr Hawthorne is the ‘classy’ man they meet. If you suspect the “eternal triangle” you’d be right, sort of, but in Jolley’s hands it doesn’t play out to script. The relationships that develop are complex … and play, for one thing, on the notion of innocence.

There is an autobiographical element to this too. In her essay collection, Central Mischief, Jolley writes about her mother’s long-running adulterous relationship, which her husband, Jolley writes, “grudgingly accepted”. He was an older, more well-off man. It’s not surprising, really, that Jolley explored complex, odd-to-many-of-us relationships.

Anyhow, besides these three, there are some secondary characters – Muriel’s mother, their neighbours the Tonkinsons, the two little daughters, and Victor and Miss Morton – who circle around these characters, being affected by or affecting the central relationships. This is very Jane Austenish too, in fact, this focus on a small range of characters operating in a small sphere, which comprises, in this case, a town in the midlands and a trip to London. In Jolley’s hands, though, there’s often a suffocating sense of lives too well controlled, too small, and of a desire, sometimes, to break out.

Jolley quotes Wordsworth: ‘…There is a dark/Invisible workmanship that reconciles/Discordant elements, and makes them move/In one society’. And so, as in most of her books, there is not a final resolution where the characters find their place, resolve their issues. There is just a point in time where they have learnt something about themselves and resolve to keep on going, doing the best they can ‘in one society’, but what that best entails is another thing.

Lisa at ANZLitLovers is also an Elizabeth Jolley fan, and has reviewed this book.

AWW Logo 2016Elizabeth Jolley
An innocent gentleman
Ringwood: Viking, 2001
258pp.
ISBN: 9780670912155

Pierre Lemaitre, The great swindle (Review)

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Pierre Lemaitre, The great swindleAs I was reading Pierre Lemaitre’s literary page-turner, The great swindle, I started to wonder about the endings of books, what I look for, what I most appreciate. What I don’t look for is neat, happy conclusions. There are exceptions to this of course. Jane Austen, for example, but she was writing at a different time when the novel was in an earlier stage of development. In contemporary novels, I look for something a little challenging, something that suggests that life isn’t neatly wrapped up. Fiction isn’t life, I know, but its role, for me anyhow, is to reflect on, and thus make me think about, life. So, Lemaitre’s The great swindle? How does it end? I’m not going to tell you – it’s not the done thing in reviews – but I will say that it’s satisfying, even though it does have one of those many-years-later wrap-ups that I’m not convinced is needed.

There, that’s an unusual opening for me, isn’t it, to start with the end? Where do I go now? Back to the beginning I think. The novel is divided into sections: 1918, November 1919, March 1920, and Epilogue. It starts in the trenches on 2 November 1918, just days before the First World War ends. One of our two main characters Albert Maillard is there, wanting a quiet, safe time until the war ends, but his commanding officer, Lieutenant Henri d’Aulnay-Pradelle, has other ideas, setting off a series of events that reverberates through all their years.

This is, in fact, quite a plot-driven novel, despite having many strings to its bow. And you all probably know how much I hate describing plots, so I’m going to keep it simple. After a devastating opening which leaves soldier Édouard Péricourt with a severely damaged face and Albert, for good reasons, taking responsibility for his care, the novel focuses on life in Paris in the immediate aftermath of war. While our two soldiers struggle to survive, Pradelle has been demobbed a Captain, as he’d orchestrated, married a wealthy young woman, Madeleine, who happens to be Édouard’s sister, and is engaged in the business of providing coffins and burying soldiers in cemeteries around France – focusing more on the money he can make than on whether, say, the right soldier ends up in the right coffin. You getting the picture of this Pradelle by now?

There are several other characters – this is a big story that owes much to the 19th century novel – but I’ll just mention a couple more: Monsieur Péricourt, Madeleine and Édouard’s father, a tough businessman who had never had time for his artisitic, effeminate son, and Merlin, the dogged, bottom-rung, about-to-retire civil servant who is given the job of reporting on the cemetery project.

Finally, just two more things you should know before I leave the plot. One is that Édouard did not want to return home after the war, so in the military hospital Albert manages to swap his identity – in a swindle, you might say – with a dead soldier, resulting in Édouard Péricourt becoming Eugene Lariviere. His father and sister, therefore, do not know he is alive. The other is the war memorial swindle concocted by Édouard (Eugene), which he finally manages to convince the “even when well-intentioned, lying was not in his nature” Albert to support.

The novel, then, has a complex plot with a rather large cast of characters, but Lemaitre, who is apparently known for his crime novels, handles it all very well so you never feel lost. One of the ways he does this is through vivid characterisation. Every character, from the main “cast” (it’s to be filmed I hear) to the supporting characters, is so strikingly portrayed that you feel you are there in postwar France – there in the streets where poor, injured returned soldiers struggle to make a living, there in the houses of the well-to-do where money is king, there in the cemeteries where Pradelle’s exploited Arab, Chinese and Senegalese workers do what they can to survive.

Another is through the clever set pieces which illuminate the characters, such as Edouard/Eugene’s increasingly bizarre masks – from horse-head to budgerigar – which he creates and wears to cover his horrendously disfigured face. Or the more gruesome scenes in which the taciturn, not very agreeable, but diligent public servant Merlin tramps around cemeteries investigating coffins. Using these set pieces, many of which border on farce, alongside controlled doses of satire and irony, Lemaitre creates a tragicomic tone – but to what end?

“will this war never be over?”

Early postwar, concerning Pradelle’s cemetery plans, the (mostly omniscient) narrator says:

To an entrepreneur, war represents significant business opportunities, even after it is over.

War, then, is the over-riding theme – but war is a big canvas. Lemaitre’s focus is war’s aftermath. What does it mean for those who went and those who stayed, and for the new world they must forge, preferably together. At one point Albert, worn down by his cares and responsibilities, and facing yet another hurdle, wonders, “will this war never be over”. But, as ordinary citizens get back to life, the needs of the returned are forgotten:

ex-soldiers were all the same, forever banging about their war, forever giving little homilies, people had had just about enough of heroes. The true heroes were dead!

A ripe environment, in other words, for cemetery and war memorial scandals, for profiteering – particularly when you add that it was a time of great social change in France, one where the nouveau riche (represented by M. Péricourt) were getting the upper hand over the often money-short aristocracy (represented by Pradelle).

Opposing this almost obsessive focus on money is a sense of resignation. It can be seen in Madeleine who marries the execrable Pradelle. “We each settle down as best we can”, comments our narrator. For many, there is a sense of “emptiness”, this word appearing several times in the novel. They were tough times – the time of “the lost generation” or what the French called “the génération au feu” – for which society was not equipped to cope. So, in the end, what Lemaitre has painted is a picture of a society under stress, a picture which is conveyed most directly through our “everyman”, our struggling returned solider Albert who just wants to make a life for himself but who is also loyal to those who need him:

War had been a lonely business, but it was nothing compared to the period since demobilisation that was beginning to seem a veritable descent into hell …

The novel, as you will have gathered, is replete with swindles, but the greatest of all, Lemaitre is saying, was the abominable treatment, upon their return, of the ordinary soldier.

This is one of those novels which uses a light touch to tell a heavy story. No wonder it won France’s main literary prize, the Prix Goncourt.

Lisa at ANZLitLovers also enjoyed this book.

Pierre Lemaitre
The great swindle
(trans. by Frank Wynne)
London: MacLehose Press, 2015
ISBN (eBook): 9781848665804

George Augustus Sala, The tyranny of pie (Review)

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When I decide to write about a Library of America (LOA) Story of the Week it is usually because it’s by a favourite author (like Willa Cather, Kate Chopin, or Edith Wharton), or by an author I want to read but haven’t yet (like John Updike or Washington Irving) or on a topic that interests me (like the environment or race issues or food). You can guess from the post title, then, why I chose the story I’m writing about today!

I’ve covered a few LOA food stories: Scotsman John M. Duncan’s “A Virginia barbecue” (1823), American George G. Foster’s “The eating-houses” (1849), and Cuban-American Ana Menéndez’s “Celebrations of Thanksgiving: Cuban offerings” (2004). Two are about events and one about restaurants, though they all mention food too of course. Englishman George Augustus Sala’s piece, however, starts from the point of view of food – the pie, which, I’ve just realised, is appropriate for this American Thanksgiving weekend. Sala, like Virginia-barbecue-Duncan, was a traveller to America, so wrote his piece from the perspective of an outsider.

George Augustus Sala

Sala c. 1855-65, by Mathew Brady (Public Domain via Wikipedia)

But, who was this Sala? Aussies will be interested to know that it was he who coined the still-used description “Marvellous Melbourne” when he visited Australia in 1885. He was born in 1828, and is described in LOA’s notes as a “prolific and flamboyant journalist”. He “found fame” as an acolyte of Charles Dickens, and was a regular contributor to Dickens’ journal, Household Words (about which I’ve written before). However, LOA continues, it was public praise from William Makepeace Thackeray which really launched his career. Unfortunately, although Sala published much and earned good money from writing for The Daily Telegraph, he was a spendthrift who was also often drunk, and “died virtually penniless”.

Now, the piece. It comes from his second trip to the States. His first trip was in 1863 during the Civil War, and while he was critical of much he did like American humour. He wrote, says LOA, a three-book series of anthologies, Yankee Drolleries (1866–1870), which introduced British readers to established authors like Oliver Wendell Holmes (whom I wrote about recently) and the up-and-coming writer, Mark Twain.

During his second trip, which resulted in his book America revisited, he found an improved America. LOA quotes this:

The truth is, that in New York there is room enough for Everybody, whereas in London, huge as it is, there is not sufficient room for Anybody.

By the late 1870s, we’re told, Manhattan had become a popular travel destination for the European upper class.

Sala, LOA also says “had a lot to say about American food. His comments range from despair and scorn to grudging, if infrequent, admiration”.  He apparently approved of New York, because its food and accommodation were “what Europeans usually consider to be refinement and comfort.” But on leaving New York, “you must expect nothing better than pork and beans and Indian pudding, or hog and hominy if you go South; the whole washed down by rough cider or molasses and water.” His short “The tyranny of pie” piece appears as a digression in his America revisited chapter about a train trip to Baltimore.

I’m sure you all know the phrase “as American as apple pie”. The Huffington Post provides some background to this in an article titled “Why are we ‘As American as Apple Pie’?” The pie was an English tradition, and brought to American by the Pilgrims, but by 1860, well before Sala’s second visit, the phrase was already in use. Novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote, says Huffington’s Kimberly Kohatsu, that “the pie is an English tradition, which, planted on American soil, forthwith ran rampant and burst forth into an untold variety of genera and species.”

It is partly this variety which captures Sala’s eye. He commences, though, by praising signs of “improvement and reform” in America – in

everything except Pie. The national manners have become softened—the men folk chew less, expectorate less, curse less; the newspapers are not half so scurrilous as our own; the Art idea is becoming rapidly developed; culture is made more and more manifest; even “intensity” in æsthetics is beginning to be heard of and Agnosticism and other “isms” too numerous to mention find exponents in “Society,” and the one absorbing and sickening topic of conversation is no longer the Almighty Dollar—but to the tyranny of Pie there is no surcease.

What is all this about we readers wonder? Soon he writes:

The day before we left New York one of the ripest scholars, the most influential journalists (on the Democratic side) the brightest wits and most genial companions in the States lunched with us. He would drink naught but Château Yquem; but he partook twice, and in amazing profusion of Pumpkin Pie.

Ah, I was thinking, he’s like me. He doesn’t like Pumpkin Pie, and wonders about the taste of this Château Yquem drinker … but, I was disappointed because, within a couple of sentences he writes:

The worst of this dreadful pie—be it of apple, of pumpkin, of mulberry, or of cranberry—is that it is so very nice. It is made delusively flat and thin, so that you can cut it into conveniently-sized triangular wedges, which slip down easily.

He then suggests that the pie is “as important a factor in American civilisation as the pot-au-feu does in France” but that England has nothing equivalent. The closest England has to a dish “by which we nationally stand or fall” is “the roast beef of Old England” but it is expensive and

there are hundreds of thousands of labouring English people who never taste roast beef from year’s end to year’s end—save when they happen to get into gaol or into the workhouse at Christmastide.

This is where his little piece ends. I did enjoy its cheeky humour, and this pointed conclusion.

George Augustus Sala
“The tyranny of pie”
First published in: America revisited: from the Bay of New York to the Gulf of Mexico, 1882.
Available: Online at the Library of America

Monday musings on Australian literature: 19th century travellers in Australia

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I’m a bit of a sucker for 19th century travellers. The one who started it all was Flora Tristan with her Peregrinations of a pariah (1838). Yes, I know, she was a Frenchwoman travelling in South America, so she’s not actually relevant here. And yet, before I get to travellers in Australia I must mention other works I’ve dipped into: Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra (1832), Isabella Bird’s Unbeaten tracks in Japan (1880), and Lafcadio Hearn’s Glimpses of unfamiliar Japan (1894). Of these, Isabella Bird is the only one to have also visited Australia, of which more anon.

Gerstacker

Public domain (via Wikipedia)

None of these, though, inspired this specific post. That honour goes to my current read, Freidrich Gerstäcker’s Australia: A German traveller in the age of gold which was first published in German in 1854, and has now been published in an English translation by Wakefield Press. It chronicles his travels in Australia in the early 1850s. As I started reading it, it occurred to me that while I’ve spoken before about 19th century explorers’ journals, I haven’t mentioned travel writing from the same period.

However, as I started doing a little research, I realised that, particularly given the period and how little the country had been “explored”, there is – or can be – a pretty fine line between explorers’ journals and those of travellers. The difference, I’d say, must be the intention, and here I’ll quote Gerstäcker:

Merely having set foot on a foreign part of the world has its own charm. No matter how passionately people are attached to their own country, they still want to see a different one, so that they can think longingly back to their own.

I’m not sure that the last bit is critical, but he does capture the traveller’s desire to see something different for his or her own reasons, as against the explorer’s goal which is more to travel to new places to gain geographical and/or scientific knowledge, usually for the benefit or use of others. For the person interested in history, though, both offer valuable “primary” insight into the life of another time.

So, I thought I’d share a few 19th century travellers (chronologically by their writings) who wrote about their travels in Australia:

Charles Darwin’s A naturalist’s voyage around the world (1860, text on PGA) describes his visit to Australia in 1836. He opens Chapter 19 with his arrival in Sydney Harbour:

Early in the morning a light air carried us towards the entrance of
Port Jackson. Instead of beholding a verdant country, interspersed
with fine houses, a straight line of yellowish cliff brought to our
minds the coast of Patagonia. A solitary lighthouse, built of white
stone, alone told us that we were near a great and populous city.

He tells of going out to Bathurst “to gain a general idea of the appearance of the country” and goes on to describe what he sees (including “the extreme uniformity of the vegetation”). He comments on his experience of indigenous Australians and also mentions convicts, but his main focus was the natural environment. After spending a couple of weeks in the area around Sydney, the Beagle went down to Hobart before heading to New Zealand.

Ellen Clacy’s A Lady’s Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852–1853 (1853, text on PGA): Clacy visited the Australian goldfields with her brother, and was only in Australia for a year or so. Her book was one of many used by Clare Wright in her award-winning The forgotten rebels of Eureka (my review). Wright quotes Clacy’s advice to Englishwomen considering emigration:

Do so by all means … the worse risk you run is that of getting married and finding yourself treated with twenty times the respect and consideration you may meet in England.

The reason for this, Clacy argues, is that because there are so few women “we may be pretty sure of having our own way”. Hmm.

Here she is on Melbourne, or, one aspect anyhow:

The most thriving trade there, is keeping an hotel or public-house, which always have a lamp before their doors. These at night serve as a beacon to the stranger to keep as far from them as possible, they being, with few exceptions, the resort, after dark, of the most ruffianly characters.

Gerstäcker comments on “the truly astonishing number” of pubs in Sydney. Seems our drinking culture started early!

Friedrich Gerstäcker’s Australia: A German traveller in the age of gold (1854): it will be a while before I finish this, but I’ve read nearly a third and am loving his descriptions of mid-19th century Sydney and of his intrepid trip along the Murray. His observations on the people and the landscape, flora and fauna he meets and sees along the way add not only to my understanding of early white-settled Australia but also of mid-19th century European thought. I love that he keeps an eye out for the bunyip, though he’s aware that there’s a chance it doesn’t exist!

Anthony Trollope’s Australia and New Zealand (1873): Trollope visited Australia in 1871, when he was 56-years-old and having negotiated, writes Fullerton (see below), a contract to write a book about the trip. Fullerton writes that “few visitors to Australia have ever worked so hard at seeing everything, learning about Australian institutions and customs, observing locals at work and at play, and covering so much ground, as did Anthony Trollope”. The aim of the book was to be useful to potential English migrants to Australia.

Isabella Bird’s “Australia Felix: First impressions of Australia” (in Leisure Hour, Feb 10, 1877): I’ve enjoyed her writings on Japan but haven’t tracked down an e-version of this article. All I know is that she “disliked” Australia. It was the first exotic place she visited (besides a trip with cousins to the USA) and I wonder whether her attitude might partly be due to inexperience as a traveller – but that may just be me being defensive!

Five is probably enough for my purposes. It’s a subject I’ll return to when I review Gerstäcker’s book … and possibly again in future posts because there are many journals out there.

Sources:

  • Susannah Fullerton, Brief encounters: Literary travellers in Australia 1836-1939, 2009 (includes more writers than I’ve mentioned here including Joseph Conrad and Robert Louis Stevenson)
  • Project Gutenberg Australia (PGA)
  • Clare Wright, The forgotten rebels of Eureka (2013)

Josephine Rowe, A loving, faithful animal (Review)

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Josephine Rowe, A loving faithful animal

How many novels have you read featuring the Vietnam War? I’ve not read many I must say, but last year I did review Charles Hall’s Summer’s gone, and now this year I’ve read Josephine Rowe’s A loving, faithful animal. It’s a debut novel but, from its form, you can tell that Rowe is an accomplished short story writer. I have in fact read one of her short stories – from her collection, Tarcutta Wake. Unusually for me, I didn’t review it at the time. I think this is because I planned to read the whole collection, but that hasn’t happened (yet, anyhow), which is clearly my loss.

So, before I discuss the content of this novel, I should explain what I mean by my comment regarding short stories and its form. For a start, it’s a multi-voice novel. On its own, this is not unusual, but here the voices are also in different persons, which is not unheard of either, really. However, added to this is the fact that the chapters (or “stories”), particularly “Breakwall”, could be read as stand-alone pieces. To make the novel out of these pieces, they are linked via character, and there’s an overall chronological narrative arc to them, but they also remain little jewels in themselves. There’s real skill here, in the way Rowe juggles her voices, perspectives, stories to create a very satisfying whole.

Now, to discuss the novel itself. It comprises six stories, starting in second person with Ruby, whom we come to realise is the younger daughter of the book’s central family. It then progresses through four stories told from different third person limited perspectives – Ruby’s mother Evelyn, her father Jack, her uncle and father’s brother Les or Tetch, and her sister Lani – before returning to Ruby’s second person voice to conclude. The story is one of a family broken by the father’s ongoing trauma (PTSD) following his Vietnam War experience. It’s a devastating story showing how such trauma can play out, resulting in domestic violence, dividing loyalties and causing splits in families.

… she did not drive away …

The novel opens on New Year’s Eve, around 1990. The family has struggled on for some time. Jack has been unable to retain good employment, going in and out of rehab, with Evelyn always drawing him back, wanting their relationship and the family to work. But, every time she takes him back, she loses something too, particularly in terms of the respect of her elder daughter. As the novel opens, it’s New Year’s Eve, and Jack has gone, for good this time it seems, after something unspeakably brutal – the full details are never, fortunately, given – has happened to the family’s pet dog, Belle, the titular “loving faithful animal”. Except, as you’d expect, there’s more to the title than this. Evelyn, too, is “a loving faithful animal”, as in her way is Ruby and, perhaps we could also argue, Jack’s half-brother, Les/Tetch. He had escaped the war by “getting rid of his own fingers” and now hovers on the edge of the family, wanting to keep an eye on them, wanting his brother to be okay, but wanting too some family for himself.

What I enjoyed most about this book, besides its tackling this important subject, is its empathetic but unsentimental portrayal of its characters. Evelyn’s loyalty (her faithfulness) is shown to be both admirable and stupid. We see the catch-22, damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t nature of her situation, with the added element of a young girl having made her bed, that is, having married against her parents’ advice, and now having to lie in it:

But she could never quite bring herself to. Run out on him like that. And it was never as simple as money. It was never as simple as pride, because she’s not sure she’s never had much of that either. Or if she does, it hasn’t turned out to be worth much, not when it comes right down to it. (II “The Coastal Years”)

Life is cruel, particularly when stubbornness and lack of forgiveness face off against each other. Anyhow, we also ache for Jack who can’t escape his past, and nor “get a handle on” the future, so leaves rather than inflict more cruelty. We see and understand Lani’s decision to reject it all and escape into a future on her own, while Ruby stays determinedly loyal. Every decision though comes at a cost.

It’s not an easy book to read, and not just because of the subject matter. Rowe is not the sort of writer who wants to tell a simple narrative. She wants to convey emotions, psychology, motivations, not just actions, because these are the stuff of life. And this requires a particular sort of writing which, for Rowe here, is a sort of minimalist, sometimes disjointed, sometimes lyrical style:

This is Exhibit A in the Museum of Possible Futures, the life that might have rolled out smooth as a bolt of satin, if she had just swung her slender legs up into that beautiful car and driven as fast as she could in the opposite direction, leaving the man with the camera far behind. Your father, he could keep the photograph.

But she did not drive away. Instead she sold the car and spent every night of her life trying to lead your father out of the jungle, out of the mud, away from the cracks of invisible rifles, strange lights through the trees. (I “A Loving, Faithful Animal”)

There’s more of course – isn’t there always? – including little running motifs involving cicadas and panthers, and Tetch whom I’ve barely mentioned, but I’ll close here. This is the sort of book that I’d love to see in next year’s awards shortlists, for its writing and for its fierce, authentic evocation of the lasting effects of war. I wonder if I will.

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) was also impressed by the book.

AWW Logo 2016

Josephine Rowe
A loving, faithful animal
St Lucia: UQP, 2016
200pp.
ISBN: 9780702253966

Bruce Pascoe, Dark emu, black seeds: Agriculture or accident? (Review)

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Bruce Pasco, Dark emu

Indigenous author Bruce Pascoe’s Dark emu, black seeds: Agriculture or accident? was my reading group’s October book, and a very interesting read and discussion it turned out to be. It’s not a simple book to discuss and really got us thinking, eliciting a variety of responses, though we all agreed with Pascoe’s basic premise that we Australians need to revise our understanding of, and beliefs about, Australia’s history. How could we not?

Publisher Magabala’s website says Dark emu

argues for a reconsideration of the ‘hunter-gatherer’ tag for pre-colonial Aboriginal Australians and attempts to rebut the colonial myths that have worked to justify dispossession.

Pascoe, they continue, contends that indigenous “systems of food production and land management have been blatantly understated in modern retellings of early Aboriginal history”.

A case to be argued

Dark emu is, then, a book that is determined to argue a case – and herein lies its challenge. In his Introduction, Pascoe sets out his main thesis which is that Aboriginal economy was “much more complicated … than the primitive hunter-gatherer lifestyle we had been told was the simple lot of Australia’s First People”. He asks:

Could it be that the accepted view of Indigenous Australians simply wandering from plant to plant, kangaroo to kangaroo in hapless opportunism was incorrect? (p.12)

Now, there are a couple of things here that disconcerted me. Firstly, emotive language like “hapless” doesn’t help when you want to present a logically argued case. And, anyhow, “hapless” is not a word I would ever apply to hunter-gatherer societies. Being hunter-gatherers doesn’t, to my mind, mean they don’t know their environment and don’t use this sense and knowledge in their hunting and gathering. But secondly, I didn’t comprehend his argument that the early settlers had no legitimate right to seize the land because Aboriginal Australians were practising agriculture:

In denying the existence of the economy they were denying the right of the people their land and fabricating the excuse that is at the heart of Australia’s claim to legitimacy today. (p.17)

Arguing this seemed to me to imply the corollary that if indigenous Australians did not have this economy, if they were indeed simply hunter-gatherers, then taking the land would be legitimate? But surely the fundamental truth is that, regardless of how indigenous people were living and using the land, it was their home and they had a right to be treated as the owners? Being on the path to sedentism, practising agriculture and aquaculture, didn’t, in my mind, make their ownership of the land more legitimate. Did it? I needed to understand this a bit more so, unusually for me, I set off looking for discussions of the book before completing my review, and I found the answer.

It was in a discussion of the book by Amy McQuire at NewMatilda.com. McQuire wanted to know why Australia had “so readily embraced” Dark emu, and whether it meant Australians must now “embrace the issue of sovereignty and treaty”. She quotes Professor of Law Megan Davis (from It’s our country: Indigenous arguments for meaningful constitutional recognition and reform):

“It mattered whether claiming a territory was done by settlement or whether by conquest and cession, because each had differing implications for the reception or not of British law.

“Settlement occurs when the land is desert and uncultivated and it is inhabited by backward people.

“Conquest means that it is a forcible invasion of occupied land and cession means that there is a treaty over occupied land. In the case of conquest, the laws of people conquered apply until the Crown or other foreign power laws apply, and in regard to cession, a treaty is entered into but the Crown or foreign power abrogates it.”

She writes “When lands are cultivated, then they are gained through conquest or they are ceded by a treaty”. And when lands are conquered or ceded, it still has laws of its own.

“Until the Crown asserts sovereignty and actually changes them ‘the ancient laws of the country remain’.”

Ah, so now the penny dropped. It’s all about the “law” (European law, that is), not about “reason” or “logic”. Pascoe makes reference to “Australia’s claim to legitimacy”. He discusses the way colonisers can fabricate history and be reluctant to credit colonised peoples (e.g.. p.61) for their achievements, and in so doing underrate sovereignty. But it didn’t properly click with me. I consequently didn’t see why he was arguing so forcefully for this “new” vision of pre-colonial Aboriginal Australian life. I was reading it more as an interesting, and yes very important, contribution to our understanding of Australian history, and I was seeing it as a way of correcting the historical record, and therefore of restoring the “truth” and, critically, “Aboriginal pride in the past”. But I didn’t fully grasp the import of the distinction he was making (and why, accordingly, the odd emotive word or long bow crept in.)

Convincing the doubters

However, this little niggle didn’t stop my being thoroughly engaged by the book. I loved the way Pascoe interrogates records from the past, particularly the journals of explorers such as Charles Sturt and Thomas Mitchell, to prove that Aboriginal Australians* were developing a sedentary culture based on intensification of agriculture and aquaculture. They managed the land, “manipulating the landscape” to produce crops for harvesting, corral animals for hunting, and trap fish for capturing and spearing. They irrigated, they built wells and dams, they stored food for future use. They built dwellings and lived in village groups. And they had been doing so for thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years making them among the world’s earliest, if not the first, agriculturalists (depending on whose “dating” you believe).

Pascoe, however, doesn’t stop at his argument that they practised agriculture. He also contends that they practised it sustainably, using a variety of techniques, including what archaeologist Rhys Jones called “firestick farming”. He argues that there’s much about Aboriginal practices that we could learn and use today, and that modern Australian agriculture could be more sustainable, particularly in our environmentally-uncertain-climate-changing world, if we focused our efforts on Australian plants and animals.

The depth of Pascoe’s research is mind-boggling, and is perhaps partly explained by his comment in that NewMatilda.com article that academics had criticised his previous writing, which apparently used his own words. He decided “to use an authority that they respected … the explorers and the settlers… you know the ‘heroic’ first settlers.” (Oh dear!) But he also draws on a wealth of other research from anthropologists (like WEH Stanner), archaeologists (like Rhys Jones), historians (like Gill Gammage and Rupert Gerritsen), and others. The book is heavily but not intrusively footnoted (I do like a footnote!), and contains an extensive bibliography.

While I would never have called myself a doubter needing to be convinced, it is true that, for all my interest in the subject, my knowledge of indigenous history and culture was rather out of date. Dark emu should, really, be read by all Australians, and at 156 pages of text, it is not a big ask.

Several of my blogger friends have reviewed this book, including historians Janine (Resident Judge of Port Phillip) and Yvonne (Stumbling Through the Past), as well as teacher-librarian Lisa (ANZLitLovers) and biographer Michelle (Adventures in Biography).

* Terminology, terminology! I note that Pascoe mostly uses the term Aboriginals.

Bruce Pascoe
Dark emu, black seeds: Agriculture or accident?
Broome: Magabala Books, 2014
175pp.
ISBN: 9781922142436

Oliver Wendell Holmes, The deacon’s masterpiece: Or the wonderful “one-hoss-shay” (Review)

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Oliver Wendell Holmes 1879

C1879, By Armstrong & Co. (Boston, Mass.), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Oliver Wendell Holmes is one of those wonderful names that, once you hear it, you can’t really forget it – at least, I can’t. But, the thing is, I often hear wonderful names of people who’ve “done things” without actually knowing what they’ve done. Oliver Wendell Holmes is one of these, and so when he popped up in the Library of America’s Story of the Week series a few months ago I made a note to check it out. The story – actually a narrative poem – has the title heading this post, with the additional subtitle, “A logical story”.

Holmes Sr – his son, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, became a Supreme Court judge – was one of those multi-talented men. Wikipedia says that he was a “physician, poet, professor, lecturer, and author” and that “his peers acclaimed him as one of the best writers of the day.” His friends included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, which helps me put him into perspective. He was a medical reformer, and was dean of the Harvard Medical School. Indeed, Wikipedia reports that “his essay on puerperal fever has been deemed ‘the most important contribution made in America to the advancement of medicine'”. With this focus on medicine, there was a big gap between his early published writings in early to mid 1830s and his return to writing in the late 1850s, but he returned to it with vigour, so much so that, as Wikipedia says, he is now best known as “a humorist and poet”.

So now let’s get to the post’s topic. He returned to writing around the age of 50, encouraged by a friend to become a founding contributor to a new magazine, The Atlantic Monthly. He wrote a monthly column reviving his earlier creation, Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. LOA’s notes describe the column:

each piece is written as a table conversation monopolized by the unnamed Autocrat, with interruptions (including poetry, stories, and jokes) from other residents—including the Professor, the Landlady’s Daughter, the Schoolmistress, the Poet, the Old Gentleman, the Divinity-Student, “the young fellow called John,” and others. The new and improved “Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table” appeared in the debut issue of The Atlantic (November 1857) and immediately became the most popular feature in a magazine that boasted works by such celebrities as Emerson, Whittier, and Longfellow.

The eleventh column is the one the LOA published as their story of the week. It describes a “one-horse chaise” (the “one-hoss shay”) that is built to last. The poem became so popular, apparently, that it was published separately in 1892 as an illustrated book.

As the story goes, a deacon builds a one-hoss shay “in such a logical way” to ensure it would not break down. He uses the very best of materials – “the strongest oak/that couldn’t be split or bent or broke” – and makes sure there is no weak spot. The shay lasts for a hundred years:

Colts grew horses, beards turned grey,
Deacon and deaconess dropped away,
Children and grandchildren–where were they?
But there stood the stout old one-hoss-shay
As fresh as on Lisbon earthquake-day!

Built, then, on the day of the Lisbon earthquake, 1 November 1755, it breaks down while being ridden by the current parson on 1 November 1855:

How it went to pieces, all at once,–
All at once, and nothing first,–
Just as bubbles do when they first.

It is a delightful read in terms of tone, voice and rhyme. I particularly love that the rhyming pattern varies, which helps keep it fresh and the reader interested, and prevents it, I think, from reading like doggerel.

Conceptually, though, it’s also interesting: this idea that you could logically work out how to build something that won’t break. You find, as Holmes describes in his introduction to the illustrated edition, “what point any particular mechanism is likely to give way” and make sure that part/point doesn’t. Then you “find the next vulnerable place, and so on”, until you arrive “logically at the perfect result attained by the deacon”.

LOA describes the work as a “semi-farcical ode to Yankee ingenuity and New World rationality”, but also says it’s been seen “as an allegory on the demise of Calvinism”. LOA also says that “the poem’s fame was such that one-hoss shay became a term used in economics and statistics, designating ‘a capital asset that exhibits neither input decay nor output decay during its lifetime’.” However, in terms of economics, I can’t help thinking about his image of what “bubbles do when they burst”.

Describing his old age, and the fact that his friends – like Emerson, Longfellow and Nathaniel Hawthorne – predeceased him, he apparently said “I feel like my own survivor … We were on deck together as we began the voyage of life … Then the craft which held us began going to pieces.” I wonder if in saying this he thought about his “one-hoss shay”!

Oliver Wendell Holmes
“The deacon’s masterpiece: Or the wonderful ‘one-hoss-shay’”
First published: The Atlantic Monthly, September 1858.
Available: Online at the Library of America

Anna Spargo-Ryan, The paper house (Review)

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Anna Spargo-Ryan, The paper-houseI hadn’t heard of Anna Spargo-Ryan’s novel, The paper-house, when it was sent to me for review, which is not surprising given it’s a debut novel. However, I loved the cover – designed by one of Australia’s top book designers, Sandy Cull – and so was more than willing to give it a go. It traverses some familiar ground, grief and loss, and  mental illness, but it did so differently enough to keep me well engaged.

The novel starts with a young couple, Heather and Dave, in a strong, happy relationship. They decide to have a child and that this means buying a house to accommodate their new family. They see one south of Melbourne and immediately know that’s it. And already here, by page 4, as she describes the end of their house-hunting, we have garnered a good sense Spargo-Ryan’s clear but evocative writing:

After six weeks of looking and imagining, we ate teacakes on the western side of the peninsula and our hearts stayed behind when we left.

So simply said – no florid adjectives – but so arresting in its clarity. And it also encompasses two motifs which feature strongly in the novel, hearts and imaginings. Indeed the book opens with the line “My heart fell out on a spring morning”. We know, right then, that this is going to be a story about feelings – not to mention, also, that our writer has a wonderful turn of phrase!

Another strong thread in the novel is that of gardens. Their new house, of course, has a garden:

And the garden: a maze of established trees and crouching shrubs and flowers with bees on them and the faint trickle of water. A garden in which to wander, in which to get lost. For picnics and parties. It breathed in time with me and spat me out into the afternoon air, where the sea caught on the updraft and shot through the corridors. I watched it heave and change as it became night.

It’s a big garden, one which disappears from view behind a “row of pittosporums with their straight backs”, one with “good solid pittos … [which] keep the neighbours out of your business”. These pittosporums become a sort of reference point in the novel for her experience of the garden and, in a way, for her mental state, because this is a story about mental states. It’s about suffering a deep, deep loss, and how this new loss brings back a similarly deep past loss that has remained unresolved.

But now, I don’t want to give away this loss, though perhaps if you’ve heard of the book you already know. The story is told chronologically but, interspersed with this main narrative which chronicles around 6 months in the couple’s lives, are flashbacks in which Heather remembers life with her mentally ill mother Shelley, with her father and her older sister Fleur, and with her Gran. It was clearly a loving family but one under immense stress which each member handled in slightly different ways. As the contemporary story exposes Heather’s increasingly unstable state, we are also inexorably led to the tragedy that occurred in Heather’s teenage life. The resolution has a certain predictability to it, but Spargo-Ryan builds it so well that it doesn’t feel clichéd.

One of the pleasures in reading this sad but ultimately hopeful book lies in the characters around Heather. Her sister and father, and elderly neighbours Sylvia and Ashok, in particular, are colourful but human, and they create a warm, engaging but not sickly-sweet community which tries to shore up Heather. There’s husband Dave too, but he is a little more shadowy, off working as a teacher during the day when much of the action takes place.

The story is told first person by Heather, and as her mental state worsens we find ourselves a little destabilised, uncertain about what is real and what isn’t. She’s reliable only in the sense that she’s telling us what she is seeing and believing, but what she sees and believes is not always “real”. This is where the garden becomes significant. Initially the focus of her dreams for her little family, it becomes escape and refuge:

I threw myself from the bed and into the air. Nightlife moved in silhouette and shadow: the broad wings of a fruit bat against the sky, the low call of the boobook owl that always spoke in couplets – mopoke, mopoke. In the garden the pittosporums stood to attention and the moon pooled at their feet.

Shhh, said my body, folding around me.

But gradually it enables her imagination to run amok – and it plays an important role in the resolution.

The book is beautifully produced – creatively presenting text and white space to mirror and convey the disarray of Heather’s mind. However, what I most liked about it is the way it conveys the impact of mental illness on family members, the way it explores how family members, neighbours and friends can work together to nurture an ill person, and, importantly, the way it shows how carers can get lost in the focus on the ill person. It’s all done through language that shines and shows, rather than didactically tells and exhorts. By the end I had real tears in my eyes, and that doesn’t happen often.

AWW Logo 2016Anna Spargo-Ryan
The paper house
Sydney: Picador, 2016
295pp.
ISBN: 9781743535202

(Review copy courtesy Picador Australia)